eaving it, and the one whom I had
seen enter at midnight with Mr. Van Burnam. Which of the two had
perished? We had been led to think, and Mr. Van Burnam had himself
acknowledged, that it was his wife; but his wife had been dressed quite
differently from the murdered woman, and was, as I soon began to see,
much more likely to have been the assassin than the victim. Would you
like to know my reasons for this extraordinary statement? If so, they
are these:

I had always seen a woman's hand in this work, but having no reason to
believe in the presence of any other woman on the scene of crime than
the victim, I had put this suspicion aside as untenable. But now that I
had found the second woman, I returned to it.

But how connect her with the murder? It seemed easy enough to do so if
this other woman was her rival. We have heard of no rival, but she may
have known of one, and this knowledge may have been at the bottom of her
disagreement with her husband and the half-crazy determination she
evinced to win his family over to her side. Let us say, then, that the
second woman was Mrs. Van Burnam's rival. That he brought her there not
knowing that his wife had effected an entrance into the house; brought
her there after an afternoon spent at the Hotel D----, during which he
had furnished her with a new outfit of less pronounced type, perhaps,
than that she had previously worn. The use of the two carriages and the
care they took to throw suspicion off their track, may have been part of
a scheme of future elopement, for I had no idea they meant to remain in
Mr. Van Burnam's house. For what purpose, then, did they go there? To
meet Mrs. Van Burnam and kill her, that their way might be clearer for
flight? No; I had rather think that they went to the house without a
thought of whom they would encounter, and that only after they had
entered the parlors did he realize that the two women he least wished to
see together had been brought by his folly face to face.

The presence in the third room of Mrs. Van Burnam's hat, gloves, and
novel seemed to argue that she had spent the evening in reading by the
dining-room table, but whether this was so or not, the stopping of a
carriage in front and the opening of the door by an accustomed hand
undoubtedly assured her that either the old gentleman or some other
member of the family had unexpectedly arrived. She was, therefore, in or
near the parlor-door when they entered, and the shock of meet